SEO and Digital Trends in&nbsp2017

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Disclaimer: This post, as with every post that aims to predict the future, should be taken with a grain of salt — no matter how authoritative the author.

The main purpose of this post is to offer ideas and open a constructive discussion around the future of SEO and digital marketing over the next 12 months.

2016 is, finally, close to its end.

It was an intense year, especially when it came to SEO and Google in particular. Because I'm deeply convinced that we cannot attempt any preview of the future without considering what happened in the past, I invite you to look back at the events that have marked the evolution of Google in the past 10 months.

It is important to note that, contrary to more classic Google timelines, I prefer to see all Google-related events in the same place. I believe it's the only way we can escape from a too-narrow vision of where Google is headed:

Google is steadily moving to a mobile-only world. Mobile-first indexing seems like the inevitable consequence of a year (or more) almost exclusively dedicated to evangelizing and forcing a change of mindset from desktop to mobile.

For the same reason, voice search seems to be the next frontier of search, partly because Bing — using a different business strategy than Google — may represent a big competitor in this arena.

Since John Giannandrea has become the Senior Vice President of Search at Google, machine and deep learning began to be used by default in every facet of Google Search. Thus, we should expect them to be used even more in 2017, perhaps with specific algorithms improving Hummingbird at every phase.

In a mobile-only world, the relevance of local search is even higher. This seems to be the strategic reason both for an update like Possum and all the tests we see in local, and also of the acquisition of a company like Urban Engines, whose purpose is to analyze the "Internet of Moving Things."

The acquisition of startups like MoodStock and EyeFluence (but also Anvato and Famebit) seems to suggest that video/images and video/images marketing will be a central focus for Google, perhaps also because YouTube is struggling against Facebook (and not just Facebook) when it comes to videos/images and their monetization.

The shift from desktop-first to mobile-first

Until now, SEOs have considered mobile search to be one of the many specializations of SEO, on the same level as local search or international SEO.

That mentality did not change much when, back in 2015, Google announced AMP. Moreover, us SEOs considered AMP just another (often annoying) "added task" to our implementation checklist, and not as a signal of the real intentions of Google: Mobile search is all search.

With the announcement of mobile-first indexing, though, these intentions are now 100% clear, and somehow they represent a Copernican Revolution: After 18 years of prioritizing desktop, now we have to prioritize mobile.

The reason for this epochal change is evident if we look at the source of the search traffic (both organic and paid) for our sites:

I designed this chart using the search traffic data Similarweb offers us. For all the industries categorized by Similarweb, I took the first five websites per search traffic volume in the USA during last November, and saw for each one of them how much traffic was from desktop and how much from mobile during the past three months.

Even though this analysis cannot be considered exhaustive and granular, as I hadn't considered the industries subcategories and I hadn't considered the "long-tail websites," surely it's indicative of a trend.

The results are clearly telling us that mobile search is bringing more traffic to websites than desktop: 20 industry niches out of 24 see mobile as their first source of traffic.

The four industry niche exceptions to this general rule are important ones, though:

Computer & Electronics

Internet & Telecom

Science

Travel

A good example of a website that still sees desktop search as its main source of search traffic is Tripadvisor.com:

However, these same percentages should also make us reflect. They don't mean that TripAdvisor isn't visited on mobile, but that other channels are relevant traffic sources on mobile more than desktop (such as direct, not to mention the mobile-only app).

AMP, then, was the main character in the Google Search-branded storytelling about mobile this year.

However, the same study reported that, globally, only 40% of all news sites articles had a mobile version of any kind.

It must be underlined that the GDELT Project study refers only to news sites and not ecommerce or other kinds of websites, which see heavier use of mobile or responsive versions. Nevertheless, it can still be considered a good barometer of the reality of the web overall.

This insight must be considered if we're planning to redesign our site, to find a balance in terms of site usability for both desktop and mobile... and I cannot help but think that the subtle (and recently not-so-subtle) suggestion from Google of moving from mobile/responsive to PWA is also influenced by this reality.

What to plan for 2017?

Prepare for mobile-first indexing

When Google announced mobile-first indexing last November 4th, it did not say that the change would happen that same day, or even after a few days.

Google, instead, said this:

To make our results more useful, we've begun experiments to make our index mobile-first.

This means that we are still in a desktop-first index, but it's almost sure that it'll switch to mobile-first in 2017.

As happened with Mobilegeddon in 2015, Google is giving us plenty of time for:

Creating a mobile version with any possible format (m. site, responsive, adaptive, PWA) of our site if we still haven't (remember how few news sites' articles have a mobile version?).

Making the content and pages presented both in mobile and desktop versions the same. Be aware that this is the only possible way to really lose rankings, because if in desktop search we have visible content and pages that were discarded in our mobile version, when mobile-first deploys, it will lose that SEO visibility. For this reason, Google suggests responsive as the easiest way to avoid this problem.

Implementing structured data in our mobile versions, because it's usually neglected in the interest of speed (and Google needs that information!).

Eventually — and hopefully — reconsidering all the user experience and conversion optimization we offer on desktop and mobile (check out this deck by Talia Wolf from MozCon). For instance, in recent months — because of the Google demotion of tabbed content — many websites started to get rid of tabs and present all their content at once. This limitation won't apply anymore once mobile-first comes.

Rethinking and planning a new link building strategy if we have a separate m. mobile site. This is more of a defensive strategy suggestion, though, because we still don't know what will happen to inbound links to desktop versions in a mobile-first indexing world. It may happen that Google will find a way to make the Link Graph independent from the nature of the sites.

In light of what Google has told us about mobile-first indexing, and that you can find finely discussed here in this Q&A on Search Engine Land, If I had to give an extreme suggestion, it would be this:

if you have a very bad mobile version, and if you know that you're not going to have a new, fully functional one in time for the end of 2017, then (absurdly) it could be better for you to have a desktop-only site.

Finally, I strongly urge you to update (or download, if you still don't use it) Screaming Frog.

In its very recent 7.0 version, Screaming Frog allows us to fetch and render crawled pages, something that before was only possible (and with a painful one-by-one URL process) via Google Search Console. Obviously, remember to set up Screaming Frog to emulate the Googlebot smartphone crawler.

Moreover, Screaming Frog now also alerts us to any blocked resource that could impede the correct rendering of our pages, again just as GSC does — but without the pain.

AMP

On the contrary! In fact, if AMP was at first directed to news websites (and blogs), recently Google started presenting AMP results for recipe sites too:

And for an ecommerce website like Ebay (one of the founders of the AMP Project):

Therefore, if your website is already receiving a great volume of traffic from mobile search, you might start scheduling the creation of an AMP version.

This should be a priority for a blog, a news site, or a recipe site.

However, if you have an ecommerce site, it could be interesting to AMP-lify a category to test the performance and ROI of creating an AMP version of it, as the AMP Project suggests here. Not every functionality that's standard in ecommerce is possible with AMP, but if I had to bet, this is the niche where the AMP Project will see its biggest enhancements; Google and Ebay are too deeply involved to ignore it.

That said, if you are an ecommerce site, while it can be exciting to experiment with AMP, your real strategic choice should be going PWA.

Progressive Web Apps (PWA)

I am quite confident that If there's a main trending topic for 2017, it will be Progressive Web Apps.

Not only has Google already started evangelizing it publicly via its Webmaster blog and developer website, but Googlers are informally suggesting it in conferences and private chats.

As we've seen above, ecommerce websites are not yet fully AMP-lifiable.

Moreover, three seconds is the new fast, according to this study Google presented last September. Even a very well-optimized responsive or m. site can barely perform with an average SiteSpeed like that if we consider how heavy web pages are right now.

Then comes the other obsession of Google: security... and PWA only works with HTTPS.

So, it's as easy as summing 1+1 to foresee how Google will push websites' owners to go PWA.

The only setback to this evangelization, ironically, could be mobile-first indexing, which is still very uncertain in all its details, hence causing people to hold off.

However, if you're an ecommerce site, don't have an app, or are reconsidering the opportunity of constantly maintaining two apps (iOS and Android) because of the need to rationalize costs, then Progressive Web Apps can be your best choice, as they allow a website to work as if it were an app (and offline, too).

Again, as we sometimes forget, SEO's future will be determined on a macro- and micro-scale by business decisions.

Context, as you can see, tends to be recurrent, and — as anyone who's studied linguistic and semantics knows — this is a very easy thing to understand.

A classic example is how "carro" means "car" in Mexico and means "carriage" or "wagon" in Spain. The meaning of a world can radically change because of context, in this case cultural context.

Contextis fundamental for understanding the meaning of the implicit and compound facets of any conversation, which is fundamental for the successful development of completely new search environments like Google Assistant and Google Home. Will Critchlow (with the collaboration of Tom Anthony) explained this well at The Inbounder last May:

Finally, context and natural language are partly the basis (for what we know) of the infamous RankBrain, as vectors too are contextual (and contexts by themselves), as Bill Slawski explains in this post.

Moreover, Google finally seems serious about understanding one of the most common (and most complex) aspects of natural language: metaphors. And once they're able to understand the meaning of metaphors, understanding the meaning of all the other rhetorical figures people use when talking (and writing) will be an easy incremental step for Google.

Why does Google have this irresistible interest in natural language?

Sure, on an ideal level, it's because Google wants "to provide the better answer to users' needs," and to do that, Google must:

Understand what each web document is about (semantics);

Understand what users are actually searching for, now more and more using their voice and typing in the search box (natural language processing).

Amazon sold about 5 million Amazon Echo in the last two years, and Amazon reported that "Echo Dot and Echo Tap, two smaller and cheaper versions of the traditional Echo device, accounted for at least 33 percent of sales in the past six months" (source: Geekwire).

As in the past with Android, Google is entering in the market when all its competitors are already established. Let's see, thanks to the adoption of Android as a mobile OS, if it will be able to recover its position and eventually become the market leader.

What to plan for 2017?

When it comes to natural language, voice search, and intelligent voice assistants, what SEOs can do is more related to optimizing for the parsing and indexing phases of the Google algorithm than to rankings themselves.

This is needed not only because Google will eventually use mobile-first indexing and these usually don't have schema implemented, but also because structured data is one of the fundamental tools Google uses for understanding the meaning of a web document. Moreover, Google is really pushing rich cards for mobile search, somehow replicating the incentivization strategy used in the past with rich snippets.

Are you worried about performance? Then it's time to adopt JSON-LD (paranoiac thought: is this also a reason why Google strongly insisted on JSON-LD for structured data?).

Featured snippets are even more prominent on mobile search, and also used by Google Home to offer answers, even though — as wisely said by Dr. Pete here on Moz — it's still not clear how that will translate into a click to our website.

Right now there are several tools that allow us to investigate and know what queries fire up a featured snippet (apart from all the other SERPs features). The ones I use are these:

RankBrain is one of the fundamental bricks toward a natural language based search engine, so if you have not already done it, start rethinking keyword research, and stop generally talking about "topics" with no real actionable strategy behind it.

Consider branding as an SEO strategy

One of main characteristics of Google, enhanced by entity search and context, is personalized search.

Personalization, then, seems to be even more important if we consider personal assistants.

Personalization means that Google will more often present content from websites that are in our search history or — through search entities — linked from websites already present in our search history.

This means that if, on a short, tactical level it's important to target long-tail queries, on a longer, strategic level the ideal is making our brand synonymous with our products and services. This can be achieved by targeting higher up the funnel with the right content in the right format, published and promoted at the right moment to the right people. This is very well described Jono Alderson at Searchlove London in 2015 (here's the video recording):

If you think that Bing is only "that search engine with cool background photos," it's time to change your mind. Bing is fueling the search of Siri and Alexa, apart from being the default search engine of Cortana. If you calculate how many iOS/OS X, Windows 10, and Amazon Echo devices are used, then you have a rough idea of how Bing could be important as voice search grows. You can read more about voice search, Cortana, and Bing in this post by Purna Virji.

SE.LO.MO (Search Local Mobile)

Only a few years ago digital marketers used to talk a lot about SO.LO.MO. (SOcial, LOcal, and MObile).

We were all talking about Foursquare marketing. Then Foursquare changed to Swarm, and we no longer talk about SO.LO.MO., partly because the marketing philosophy behind it has become a default practice.

However, now with mobile as the first search traffic source and the unstoppable success of personal assistants and chatbots (I invite you to look this deck by Jes Stiles), the idea of doing marketing locally and mobile is even more pressing and promising, although there are technologies like beacons that don't seem able to conquer the market, maybe because they're too advanced with respect to consumer behavior.

Returning to TripAdvisor as an example, if we look at which queries bring more organic traffic from mobile (and excluding branded searches), we see these:

Click on the image to see a larger version

Apart from telling us that people in the USA really like to go out for dinner without any clue on where to go, what this simple analysis shows is that people search on the go more and more. They've finally understood that searches are localized and they don't need to explicitly indicate their location. Perhaps even more important, they now fully know that their results pages are personalized.

What this snapshot above is not telling us, though, is a trend that could become the new normal in the next future: longer verbose queries because of voice search.

In fact, if we dig into the Similarweb mobile keyword report, we can start finding these kind of queries:

The SERPs answering these queries, though, also show us one problem and one opportunity:

The problem is that these SERPs, while having a clear local intent, quite often do not present any local search pack.

The opportunity is that, despite these queries indeed being "local," Google fails to offer relevant results able to answer them (see the "five star restaurants like salvatores in western new york" as an example).

Therefore:

Thinking of local search only as MyBusiness optimization may limit the opportunities businesses (especially local businesses) can have to earn SEO visibility and traffic.

Also, local business websites should start working to intercept the potential traffic generated by those kinds of queries. There is a real opportunity in those kind of queries, simply because (still) nobody is really thinking about them (apart fromTripAdvisor, as its result for "where to get breakfast near grand hotel francais paris" testifies).

How to achieve that?

Probably not by trying to target all the infinite possible combinations of local searches a user can do in relation to our kind of business and our location. That would be equal to creating content of very poor quality, when thinking about how Hummingbird and, in many aspects, RankBrain work.

This leads me to redirect you back to the previous chapter of this post about semantics, natural language, and context.

Even if you’re not a publisher in the traditional sense of the word, you should prepare for a time when no one ever visits your website. Awareness, research, and conversion will all happen in search results, and the companies whose websites facilitate that paradigm on the leading edge will be rewarded with more customers while competitors scramble to catch up. This means as much Schema.org and JSON-LD markup as possible, and partnering with third parties that have cut deals with Google to facilitate transactions (see: OpenTable and ZocDoc).

THE IRRESISTIBLE ASCENT OF VIDEO (and the images strike back)

Video

This post by Contently is old (July 2015), but it shared still-interesting stats via an Emarketer study about the growth of video consumption online.

Consumption of video online is growing, even though — apparently — it's not really stealing time away from TV.

Things look different if we look at "generations" (I don't really like marketing segmentations such as "millennials," but we can still use them for brevity):

What this chart is forgetting, though, is the youngest audience (from 4–13 years old). If you have a child around those ages, you'll agree that she consumes video mostly online. For instance, my kids' idols are Iron Man, Aragorn, Luke Skywalker, and DanTDM, a YouTuber, who shares his videos while playing games like Minecraft.

Let's add a final stat about what device is used the most for watching videos online:

Laptop & desktop are still the most-used devices, but smartphone is quickly growing.

Finally, if we pair to this video frenzy the equally irresistible rise of native advertising (pro tip: follow Melanie Deziel), then see that Google acquired companies like Anvato (a "video platform that guarantees video playback and monetization from signal to every screen" as it describes itself) and Famebit (an "Influencer Marketing Platform for YouTube, Instagram, and More", as its title tag recites) is not a surprise at all.

Google needs to find new ways of monetizing videos... and YouTube is not enough anymore.

More concretely, if we think about our 2017 SEO and digital marketing strategy, video seems to be a channel that we should start exploring more seriously, if we did not consider it before.

And when it comes to digital PR, we should start considering online videos stars as much (if not more) influencers as any classic blogger.

Images

In 2017, for almost the same reasons explained above for video, we should expect a return in interest for images marketing, especially in Google search.

Let's be honest: Images search, as it is right now, is the dinosaur of Google search. For us SEOs it hasn't been useful in bringing traffic to our websites for many years and, for Google, it's not profitable.

Maybe this is one of reasons why Google bought Moodstock and invests so much intellectual and machine learning efforts in image recognition.

People do showrooming... They go into a store, take photos of products with their smartphone, and then search for online offers for those same products.

It should not be silly to think that Google could "help" this search thanks to image recognition, because it already does it quite well with its reverse image search feature.

Moreover, with Schema.org/Product, we can tag the images of our products so that Google can easily pair product images to other characteristics like prices, offers, and stock availability.

With this data, it could start monetizing the Images vertical once for all.

[NOTE: As I was writing this, Google announced that it will start showing product schema rich snippets in image search results... so this is no longer a risky preview, but partly a reality!]

Hello Gianluca, a bit long post but enough interesting to read the whole. Would like to answer your questions, here I go -

What are you previews for 2017?

The more beautiful you write, the more positive user experience you get and ultimately a good position in Google. This will for 2017 and beyond that. Mobile users are increasing so it you must aware with all the mobile SEO tactics and even updated that Google making. Otherwise, it would be hard to beat competitors for sure.

What will be the tactics you'll concentrate on?

Find link opportunity instead of doing intentional link building

User experience, the most. How good experience we can give to a user and this could be done by asking a user him/her self.

Research the market, write what is not there, give a damn good reason why people should read it and let the people share your blog for you :) .. Of course, a great position for your site in Google.

Build a brand and let costumers find you. Stop running behind ranking, traffic, bounce rate, etc, Think wise. Everybody need a better ROI, so let's run behind it first by anyhow and get it. Can be done by Social media, PR and news sharing in the market, outreach, offline promotions like webinars, etc.

Get/earn strong links rather than so many links. Hope you get it.

How you will develop your marketing strategy?

I guess, the way of marketing strategy should be developed same as we are doing since years (Doing market research, competitor research, stuffs than can attract costumers, technical changes and rest i explained in above point )

What "features" do you think will be disrupting in 2017?

To me, currently my every project/client's ranking is not stable, all the keywords are fluctuating so much. So, I am thinking what Google gonna do with the latest penguin real time update. I am waiting when It will be fixed because getting so much various results everyday.

I agree with most of the things you wrote... however, do not commit the mistake of considering "content" only written content. In fact, it has also been proved (I think it was Rand doing this kind of analysis in a previous WBF, but I remember also a Distilled study about this) that for certain queries - for instance - Google tends to prize photo galleries kind of web pages, while, in others cases, long forms or web pages with a web application.

Yeah, content not meant to only written stuffs, it is equal to all types of content marketing including video, infographics, and also as you have mentioned photo galleries kind of web pages, agree with this as well.

Hey, Gianluca.Thanks for this in-depth breakdown, it's a good reminder that we have to consider a lot this year.

As for my tactics, we discussed one recently on Digital Olympus :D I still think that backlinks will rule.

As for marketing strategy we'll be focusing on content mostly,

And I agree, positions in Google are going crazy, when I compare data between Yandex and Google it looks like Google's new algorithm should be called Random Ranking, on some of my projects positions go like 13>31>49>47>1>96>7>OUT>44>19>OUT>2>3>OUT>95

I think that links still are very important too. And they will always be important, also because they are one of the foundation of the Internet itself (which is based on hypertext and hyperlinks). In this sense we both agree.

The only difference is in how to achieve them, but I can understand your reasoning for when it comes to short-life websites.

Great year for SEO from my perspective, especially now Penguin is real-time which will (hopefully) eliminate some of the scrubs and their pesky link building tools. I beleive SEO is developing into a more technical role, as I work for a fairly large eCommerce company as an SEO Analyst, I don't find myself doing the day-to-day tasks as I would have done agency-side, instead I'm starting to become involved in the more technical stuff, crawls, log file analysis, using XPath extractions with Screaming frog etc.

The mobile-first transition is also going to be a very interesting one, I'm hoping some industry experts will talk about this next year at conferences.

I've had more chatter from clients than ever in 2016 talking about UX, knowing what it is, and why they need it, than ever. It's gone from having to explain what it is in relation to UI (many clients still lump them together), to them expecting a sophisticated UX approach where they understand the importance of speed, clear CTAs etc. These were the same types of people just a few years ago that were saying "just make it pop"!

Hey Gianluca, Thanks for sharing the post. Very thorough and interesting SEO trends.

I agree with you that mobile-indexing first is an inevitable consequence of a year and there is no wonder why google is prioritizing mobiles. Mobile devices are very essential to people nowadays. We can check and do business wherever we go with just the piece of hand held devices. If google is going into this we should also focus on how we do business in mobile platforms. But without mobile SEO and AMP we won't be able to achieve organic traffic growth in 2017. By the way, tools like SE Ranking can check mobile search results, including Google Maps results too.

Many businesses should take notice of local search holistically and test local-specific AdWords placements in conjunction with their local SEO efforts.

For 2017, we should also pay attention to the more payment options. In 2017 the number of people who chose the “mobile payments” will grow in 2017, therefore the number of payment methods must be expanded.

Thanks for the great year-end-roundup and peek into 2017 Gianluca. This is the best one I've seen yet, and I couldn't agree more with your analysis on what eCommerce sites should be looking into with regard to monetizing images with schema product markup, getting their mobile sites to have parity with desktop (in content, markup and meta), and being more concerned with single page applications (SPA) than AMP for their eCommerce content (AMP for their blogs).

All of this is coming down on us like an avalanche, and I think it's safe to say that most SEOs are struggling to keep up with everything (as are the tools we use). I hope going into the new year we all remember that one can't be a deep expert in all things online marketing, or even SEO. That is where our thriving community of shared knowledge comes in handy.

Hello Gianluca, thank you for the blog. This article helps us a lot, we are a company specialized in SEO and digital marketing and we totally agree with you with what you have written. We are making a mobile version of our website since we think that in the near future, it will be the most used tool and also the use of videos as digital marketing strategy. Congratulations Gianluca, good job! a greeting

This way, if anyone wants to read those patents (and my blog posts about them) in the context of your post, they now can. I also included posts about Google patents that I wrote at Go Fish Digital as well, to give a full picture of what Google was working upon in 2016.

Great blog post! Voice search is absolutely a new frontier and one of the most interesting developing areas. Im very interested to see what changes occur in the area of local search with the integration of voice search

Thank you for the chart with which you start this post off with. I do like the listing of the patents at the top of that graphic, and you have me thinking of writing a post pointing out the posts I wrote about them, and summarizing them.

2017 should be an interesting year, and I'm anticipating more Semantic technology and entities and artificial intelligence showing up in Google Search Results. There were some amazing papers from Google this year as well, and I think some things they point out haven't been made part of most SEOs vocabularies, such as a Click, Attention, and Satisfaction Evaluation Model, and a C0-Occurrence Topic Model. I'm hoping we can fix that and help others learn more about those.

I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on this part, where you wrote: "RankBrain is one of the fundamental bricks toward a natural language based search engine, so if you have not already done it, start rethinking keyword research, and stop generally talking about "topics" with no real actionable strategy behind it".

But isn't the whole point of Rankbrain to understand conversational content? Taking a strategic approach to content/keyword structure is of course the best bet, but if you're generally talking about topics, whether there's a strategy behind it or not, isn't this exactly the kind of keyword-grouped content that Google is trying its best to be able to parse into answers?

The way I do keyword research is to not think about individual queries, but instead to think about topics (or grouped keyword buckets) and the search intent around those topics. This then spits out a framework for content ideation. Is this the wrong way to go about it?

Nice! I'm really interested to see how voice-activated search evolves and how the SEO community continues to adapt to these advancements. Meanwhile, I'll also continue generating ridiculous amounts of leads on social media to keep clients happy while the search engines continue to turn into AI robots!

We agree. Google has a long way to go to get the local results more relevant for certain terms. One thing that a bigger emphasis on local will lead to is reviews. Within the local pack reviews definitely make your brand stand out. So when faced with making a purchasing decision/research - (Trip Advisor reviews kill it here). There are quite a few good pieces of software focusing on online reputation management and these can only benefit from above.

Agree but a large portion of the Tripadvisor and Google reviews are fake. There's a whole industry generating fake reviews on Tripadvisor and the other review sites. I wonder how Google and the others will handle that.

It's amazing to me how detailed you were with this post. Nice work. I own a local service business, so for me the biggest takeaways are: 1) More mobile traffic as a % of total traffic. This means I need to work on optimizing mobile conversions for my service sales. 2) Using AMP for a service. I think Google is going to continue pushing AMP and that will expand to product/service e-commerce websites. I already downloaded a beta phase WP plugin to make AMP versions of my pages available but I need to do more. 3) Begin content marketing efforts (I own a relatively new business) with a mobile first focus using AMP, and use that content to convert customers.

Hey man, I enjoyed the read alot! It was a great way to be reminded which technology is just about to kick in when we're talking about search engines. The rules of SEO are ever changing. Not in the "panic" way, but it's steadily turning in another direction with voice search, VR etc that we'll have to adabt our SEO effort to ;-)

I resume: don't think about what to not do, but think in solving your users pain points creating content (which is not only written content) that stands out the average mediocrity of the 99% of the websites. And then plan a lot: a link building campaign is not something you can do only one week before your launching a product or service or study.

I am agree with you that backlinks are so much important for SEO, but if you do it as per the SEO guidelines with proper strategy. Free backlink creation websites can still be used to serve this purpose with a proper plan. If you create high quality free backlinks on regular basis with theme based or long tail anchor texts then it may be very useful for improving the search engine rankings. Some of the paid backlinks are also important to achieve high authority backlinks on better quality websites and nowadays Google search engine is also smart enough in discovering the paid bad quality or good quality backlinks. So let's create backlinks in an ethical way ;)

Thank you for the long and detailed blog. With Google’s Mobilegeddon, it comes as no surprise why search engines are favoring responsive websites. For 2017, I think content quality and local keywords will, pretty much, dominate all search engine rankings.

Loved this post. Just wanted to add confirm the following points which I have seen time and time again in my freelance work:

1. AMP pages are going to be huge, with page speed likely to become a larger importance by proxy.

2. (Get ready for the cringe) Content still remains king. I have been able to effectively rank a festival guide, (which is now sitting around the 7th position) with no backlinks, just quality content.

3. The Penguin update has been a blessing to my clients. Following a backlink audit and subsequent disavow, each client has seen a large rise as Penguin immediately recognises the the removal of harmful links.

Sorry if this hasn’t added any deeper insights, just wanted to add my top 3 stand out trends that I believe will continue to grow in 2017.

Hello Gianluca,This article was really amazing! It had the most genuine and honest advice along with the updated information about the latest trends in SEO. I have been working with many companies for many years to help them grow their business in a realistic and compelling way, but still, I have learned a lot new from this post. I look forward to more great and insightful posts like this in the future.Cheers!!Cody Oelker

Thank you for the article Gianluca, it does offer quite a lot to think about.

The shift toward mobile marketing has been coming for some time and it is important that marketers are prepared to make any necessary adjustments. It is certain to be a huge market in the coming years.

There is a downside to mobile marketing though, which is that it’s often a hassle to sign up to new sites as it is required to fill in forms. This can often kill any buying impulse, killing the sale along with it.

Here at expressly, however, we have a solution to the problem of filling in forms online. We have created a network of online merchants that help each other in their digital marketing campaigns by advertising each other’s products. When an ad to an expressly partner is clicked on, the customer’s account details from their existing account with the advertising merchant is passed on automatically to the new merchant.

This means that the customer is taken straight through to the buying page without the hassle of filling in forms. It significantly increases conversions, meaning we can offer a better ROI than our competitors.

I'm surprised that none of the experts explicitly mentioned the growing importance of Online Reviews. It seems like an essential marriage of local and social that I believe will continue to have a growing impact on SERPs. I'm curious if Online Reviews will play a role in Voice Search (especially if the goal is to produce the one 'best' answer.)

I guess Online Reviews do not feel like the purview of SEO experts since it's not something that can be completely managed behind the scenes. Customer Service has such a massive impact on reviews.

Well written and detailed information on what could possibly be in store for the next year. What I feel is sometime in the future Google could possibly use the AMP version for ranking in the mobile index.

Amazing post! I love the amount of depth, detail and research that went into it. I'm certainly a little worried about the transition into 2017.

I'm not fully sure why but I'm still kind of sad about the decline of desktop usage and the take-over of mobile. I and everyone else saw it coming years ago but I was hoping to still be able to latch on to putting desktop first.

I'm still kind of sad about the decline of desktop usage and the take-over of mobile. I and everyone else saw it coming years ago but I was expecting to still be able to latch on to placing desktop first.for this type you can go for mobile development training and desktop development training at benchfolks

Very informative post. Thanks for sharing this in-depth information about the SEO trends for the year 2017.

Definitely the coming year would focus more on mobile indexing as the rate of mobile users as compared to desktop users have escalated.Voice search is another way through which technology has made our lives simpler so definitely its going to be a huge hit.

Thank you for the great info! First, I think it helps to use the data and performance of your work over the years, make predictions like some of the ones you've stated above, and then split test strategies. By doing small scale R&D, it saves a lot of time and money on the larger projects. I think Google is placing a lot of weight on quality backlinks that are relevant and natural, looking at anchor texts as a whole profile, and giving a lot of credit to those who are fully optimized and can handle large amounts of traffic if the keyword is a high search phrase.